9/24/2010 @ 6:34AM8,590 views

The Shortcut To Serfdom

Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

The size and scope of the federal government is alarming. Spending is out of control. The budget deficit and the national debt are long term threats to American prosperity. On all these subjects, I am in agreement with Messieurs Brooks and Ryan. I share both their preference for a free enterprise system and their aversion to European-style socialist economy.

But the passage above is uninformed nonsense.

Seven decades have passed since The Road to Serfdom was published. Social democracy hasn’t yet led Europe or any of its diverse countries into serfdom. On the contrary, they’re are among the most free and prosperous countries in the history of human civilization. I prefer the American system. It’s better, all things considered. In order to make the case for it, we need not pretend that the people of Europe are in chains.

On the other hand, “the jack booted thug” and “the knock in the night” aren’t consigned to history merely because the authors act as though they’re quaint vestiges of history — to be read about in Holocaust memoirs and dystopian novels, but ignored when it comes time to assess how best to guard our liberty.

The United States is not on the brink of turning into Oceania, or even Singapore. But anyone with their eyes open ought to notice that the United States is already too close for comfort to “knocks in the night” and “jackbooted thugs.” Even worse, most Americans are either ignorant of that fact, or else unconcerned by truly egregious state behavior. This blindness is particularly striking among conservatives, who are constantly worrying about lost liberty, and looking for its leading indicators in all the wrong places. But it is a bi-partisan and cross-ideological myopia.

Let us confront what is in front of our noses.

– The President of the United States asserts the power to order the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens far from any field of battle.

– After illegally spying on a domestic political group, the FBI lied to Congress about their behavior in order to cover it up. Now that this is known there is no effort to punish the transgression.

– Officers inside the NYPD were ordered by their superiors to engage in illegal behavior, including being encouraged to wrongfully arrest innocent citizens. When one officer complained, his superior had him committed to a mental hospital against his will. And he got the whole thing on tape.

– “Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home,” Radley Balko documents in this indispensable report. “These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.”

– This just in: “A USA TODAY investigation documented 201 criminal cases across the nation in which federal judges found that prosecutors broke the rules. The abuses put innocent people in jail, set guilty people free.”

Civil forfeiture laws represent one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today. Under civil forfeiture, police and prosecutors can seize your car or other property, sell it and use the proceeds to fund agency budgets—all without so much as charging you with a crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, where property is taken after its owner has been found guilty in a court of law, with civil forfeiture, owners need not be charged with or convicted of a crime to lose homes, cars, cash or other property. Americans are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but civil forfeiture turns that principle on its head. With civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

This is a severely abridged sampling of the manifold ways our civil liberties are under attack. The War on Drugs and The War on Terrorism are the biggest culprits. Unfortunately, the Republican Party — the one that is always fretting about lost liberty — generally lends law enforcement and anti-terrorism efforts their blind support, and appoints too many judges who do the same. As you can see in the quote that begins this piece, it’s thought-leaders go so far as to assert that these issues are less worrisome attacks on liberty than President Obama’s domestic agenda.

I regard the actual, ongoing abrogation of civil liberties in America as the clearer, more present danger, as compared to the unintended consequences of “smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises.” Indeed, these issues seem to me unsurpassed in their importance.

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